Why innovation requires university collaboration

For startups, a staff of engineers and specialists alone will not lead to innovation. Runa Capital senior partner Sergei Belousov explains why businesses hoping for innovation need to invest early in science and partnerships with universities. According to the expert, innovation cannot be had without these links to scientific traditions and methods.

Startup communities tend to
fall prey to a dangerous delusion: the assumption that hiring experienced professional
engineers actually suffices to build an innovative, high-tech business. Such
specialists are certainly necessary, but they alone will not be enough. Indeed,
to innovate, you need people capable of hitting on new ways for solving
problems — something that scientists rather than engineers are trained to do.
Without a scientific approach and scientific curiosity, there is no way to
innovate.

It is widely believed that the
thing Russia lacks is investment, business practices or democratic
institutions. These are certainly important components. However, what
innovations really require is continued traditions of fundamental and applied
science: we still have education, but we have almost no science left.

Obviously, fundamental
research falls within the scope of the government's responsibility. Yet any
business (even a startup) can actually reach out to people involved in
scientific research. How do we do it at Parallels?

Right from the outset, we
designated a coordinator to network with leading higher educational
institutions. At each university, Parallels set up a department, paying a bonus
to teachers and a stipend to students. We keep in touch with the students by
influencing the areas they cover in their term papers and graduate research dissertations.

This is an important
nuance. Many startups actually use students as a cheap labor force. This
approach is wrong: you will get the wrong kind of students. Good students will stay
and write graduate research papers or theses at their departments. People with
an insatiable curiosity make the best specialists. It is important to lure them
carefully into your business, without binding them to specific research topics
or demanding that they join your team when they graduate.

Related

It is important to clearly understand
that most of the profit is generated by smart employees. I do not know a better
way to bring smart people into a company than to work with universities. Most
startups do not even consider cooperating with universities, though they are
constantly in search of human resources and waste money on recruiting. How
expensive can such cooperation be? Parallels spends over $300,000 a year, but
even a smaller amount of $50,000 would do.

When I tell this to
startups, they often miss the importance of it and are reluctant to invest in a
cause that will not yield any results for several years. Even so, all Russian
IT companies that have managed to grow to greatness actually started out this
way, including Yandex, Kaspersky Lab, Parallels, and ABBYY. We were already
investing in science and cooperation with universities before our companies
were even profitable.

Sergei Belousov is a senior partner at Runa Capital, as well as the
founder and co-owner of Parallels, Acronis, Acumatica and Rolsen.